Gabe Newell: Linux is the future of gaming, new hardware coming soon

Valve chief blasts PC market, promises big news is coming next week.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, said today that Linux is the future of gaming despite its current minuscule share of the market.

That seems hard to believe, given that Newell acknowledged Linux gaming generally accounts for less than one percent of the market by any measure including players, player minutes, and revenue. But Valve is going to do its best to make sure Linux becomes the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms.

Newell made his comments while delivering a keynote at LinuxCon in New Orleans. "It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming," Newell said. "It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope."

Valve brought Steam to Linux in February, and the platform now has 198 games. Newell has previously promised to unveil a Linux-based "Steam box" to compete against living room gaming consoles sometime this year, and his company has updated the Steam software to work better on TVs. While he didn't specifically mention the Steam box today, Newell hinted at an announcement next week.

"Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," Newell said.

Getting games to work on Linux has its challenges. If not implemented right, "Just compile it yourself" could be the inconvenient solution to the problem of installing games and applying updates, he said. However, Valve worked through these problems in bringing Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux, hopefully showing the way to other developers, he said.

Bringing Steam to Linux "was a signal for our development partners that we really were serious about this Linux thing we were talking about," Newell said.

Besides just releasing Steam on Linux-based operating systems, Valve is contributing to the LLDB debugger project and is co-developing an additional debugger for Linux, Newell said.

"When we talk to developers and say, 'if you can pick one thing for Valve to work on the tools side to make Linux a better development target,' they always say we should build a debugger," he said.

Newell has previously complained about Windows 8 being a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," and he reiterated these concerns today. Closed platforms are going to lose to open ones that allow innovation, he said. But that won't stop Steam's rise: Despite year-over-year declines in the PC market, Steam has seen a 76 percent increase in its own sales according to Newell.

"I think we'll see either significant restructuring or market exits by top five PC players. It's looking pretty grim," he said. "Systems which are innovation-friendly and embrace openness are going to have a greater competitive advantage to closed or tightly regulated systems."

The biggest thing for me at this point is my backlog of Windows titles. If were to integrate Wine in such a way that games unlikely to ever see a direct Linux port (i.e. older titles) could be installed and run transparently via Steam, I'd probably move over pretty quickly as that's really the only thing keeping me on Windows at this point.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

198 games is "only a handful"?

You must have extremely large hands. Do you use a tablet as a phone?

And why use a Bay Trail CPU to beat a PS4/XB1 when you can get a similar AMD APU (with or without the graphics card) for the same price and performance?

The number of games is less relevant than the number of quality games. 200 indie games that won't spark much interest outside of a small group is less useful than 10 big budget games that will drive the numbers needed to increase adoption.